Okay, what is the blank presentation option?

This option gets you started making slides from scratch. It's the building block of a presentation. Let me show you how.

My Aunt Edna used to make pancakes from scratch. Mmm.

Uh, don't pour any syrup on the slides, though, Jim. Heh heh.

Creating a slide from scratch In the next step you will create a Title Slide for your presentation using the Blank Presentation option. You will be working in Slide View. 1. Open the PowerPoint program. The PowerPoint dialog box appears. 2. In the PowerPoint dialog box, click the Blank Presentation option button. The New Slide dialog box appears. It asks you to choose an AutoLayout format. 3. Click the Title Slide layout. It's the first in the list. The name Title Slide appears in the preview box. 4. Click OK. A Title Slide appears, ready for you to work with. Note: The PowerPoint dialog box appears only when you first launch the program. If you are already working in PowerPoint and want to create a new blank presentation, click the New button on the Standard Toolbar or follow these steps: 1. Click the File menu, then Click New. 2. In the New Presentation dialog box, click Blank Presentation, and then click OK.

Okay, now we have a Title Slide. But something's missing. Any guesses?

Hey, who's interviewing who here?

I know. The title!

Good guess, Sue. Let me show you how to add text to those blank slides.

Adding text to a slide The Title Slide layout contains text boxes for a title and a subtitle. Try typing text into these boxes. 1. Click in the Title text box. A thick gray border appears around the text box indicating that it is selected. 2. Type a title. 3. Click the Subtitle text box and type a subtitle. Congratulations! You've just created your first slide in PowerPoint 97.

Okay, you've created an impressive Title Slide for us. But that's just one slide! We need to create more slides or else we're going to have a pretty darn short presentation, aren't we?

Wow, these hard-hitting investigative questions don't let up do they? You should be on 60 Minutes. Here, let me show you how to add another slide...

Adding another slide 1. Click the New Slide button on the Common Tasks toolbar. 2. The AutoLayout dialog box will appear. Choose a layout for your next slide.

Okay, so now we have multiple slides for our presentation. But how do we move from slide to slide?

It's as easy as the click of a button. Literally. Just click and you've moved to a new slide.

That's great! You've got the moves, baby.

Moving from slide to slide Let's say you've created several slides for your presentation. You've finished working on the last slide, and now you want to take a look at your other slides. Here's how you move from slide to slide in Slide View. To move to a previous slide: 1. Click the upper double-arrow button on the lower right corner of the PowerPoint window. The previous slide will appear. To move to the next slide: 1. Click the lower double-arrow button on the lower right corner of the PowerPoint window.